7 Comments

• AndrewR 26th Mar '11 - 10:41am

  It is not just the benefits in kind that people don’t factor in they also tend to ignore the fact the PM also gets a 65K MP salary, generous expenses and the opportunity to make a mint when their employers sack them.

  But the reason why it is silly to use the PM’s salary as a yardstick is because it is a job that requires no qualifications or experience. The PM’s job is a very special case and therefore not the one by which others should be judged.

• Geoffrey Payne 26th Mar '11 - 11:09am

  It is probably impossible to organise the pay people get in a fair way. Ideally we should be paid in terms of what we contribute to society. Public sector workers; fire fighters, nurses, teachers, policy, armed forces, emergency services, social workers and no doubt many others do monumental jobs. Yet they get paid a pittence and many of them are now set to lose their jobs. Conversely with those who are high earners are a mixed bunch. Some are entrepreneurs who succeeded having started with nothing, and they too deserve rich rewards. Well some of them anyway. Again looked at by the criteria of what they contribute to society it depends on what their business does and how it conducts itself. On the other hand there are some bankers who made a fortune by taking advantage of perverse incentives that encourage short term gain with no regard for the long term consequences, which as we know turned out to be devastating. What is lamentable here is that few if any spoke out, yet they must have known that what they were doing was “socially useless” to quote Adair Turner.
  Fundamentally the problem here is that pay is determined not by how socially useful that person’d work is, but by market forces, of which there is a weak correlation.
  There is not viable mechanism to make social usefulness the main criteria for what people get paid, so instead we have to make the best of a bad job, building in better incentives and penalties into the economy to correct market failures and shortcomings. Radically restructuring the banks is an obvious example of that.
  Unfortunately we cannot make front line public sector workers rich, even though they deserve that more than anyone else.
  But there are things that can be done. The pay of the prime minister is not particularly governed by market forces. I think the performance of our prime ministers has been lamentable for a good many years. The last great government was the 1945 – 1950 government which created the NHS and transformed the lives of millions for the better. Every prime minister since then has been paid too much.
  As for local authority leaders, I think Ken Livingstone did a great job in introducing the congestion charge in London. Despite considerable opposition it has since survived the Tory mayor that followed. On a smaller scale Sutton council was in the 1980s a leader in implementing Green policies and won awards for doing so. I do not have the knowledge to comment on other local authorities.
  So is the prime minister’s pay a useful yardstick? No. It is hard to imagine what a useful yardstick would be. But once you get paid more that £100K it is hard to spend all the money you get anyway so anything above that has diminishing returns and is not worth it.

• Hywel 26th Mar '11 - 1:56pm

  “The last great government was the 1945 – 1950 government which created the NHS and transformed the lives of millions for the better.”

  As this is a discussion thread I’ll lob in these little hand grenades

  Objectively you could compare the 97-01 Government in terms of its constitutional changes (Scottish/Welsh devolution, Human Rights Act etc). Arguably the 45 Government would have introduced a welfare state & NHS in some form whoever had been elected.

  The 79-87 government was a government of very radical change – it’s a matter of political perspective whether it was a great government (on balance not IMO) but the changes it made were driven through by the Prime Minister so looked at from the point of view of “did she deliver on her political agenda” you have to give Thatcher plaudits for having done so.

  (There praising Blair AND Thatcher in one go – that should ensure I lose the maximum amount of votes!)

• Iain Coleman 26th Mar '11 - 3:30pm

  I do think the PM’s salary (plus benefits) is a useful yardstick. Large salaries are usually justified on the basis that the job involves a lot of hard work and a great deal of responsibility, and that it is important to attract good candidates. I doubt there are any jobs which involve more hard work than being PM. There are certainly none that involve greater responsibility. And at the current salary, there is no shortage of candidates. So it is reasonable to assume that salaries greatly in excess of the PM’s are not a necessary requirement for filling the role, and could be reduced without harm to the economy or to society.

• David Le Grice 26th Mar '11 - 8:35pm

  If it is to be used as a yardstick then It should apply to private sector public service providers (Serco et al.) who can already out compete the public sector for the best talent with high salaries.

• brian 27th Mar '11 - 9:46am

  To use PM’s pay as a yardstick displays amazing ignorance. The PM is a politician who, together with colleagues prescibes policy usually via parliament. Civil servants and chief execs of Councils implement those policies by managing staff and resources. They are managers. Managers are trained professionals – there are University qualifications for managers. The comparison is like that between apples and oranges.
  I was disappointed to see the comparison in the last Lib Dem manifesto but that document is now irrelevant anyway!

• Matt J. McLaren 28th Mar '11 - 11:13am

  The Prime Minister is the de facto, if not de jure (since that would be the Queen), head of the public sector. He is more than just a policy maker contrary to what the last commentator suggested, since in chairing COBRA and the National Security Council in particular, s/he has to make – or at least is responsible for the making of – certain operational decisions. The Civil Service, Police, Security Services, and Armed Services will at various times in his or her office, depending on the circumstances and the crisis at hand, present him or her with options and s/he will have to make a decision. Such decisions can quite literally be life or death. Not only that but the Prime Minister is a manager of the Government as a whole, with its raft of Cabinet Sub-Committees, Task Forces, Tzars etc. etc. To pretend that the job of Prime Minister is one that any old unqualified untalented idiot can do is to live in a fairy tale. Of course there are no ordinary qualifications for the role since that would be totally undemocratic, but there is one big qualification – to command the confidence of the House of Commons, and by extension have the support of the British people. That is the biggest and most important qualification there can ever be for a public sector job, and I don’t see how thinking otherwise is either liberal or democratic.

  So, returning to my first point, since the Premier is the head of the public sector, and is the senior manager with probably more responsibility than any other job in the public sector, and with the highest and most demanding qualification; I think it is absolutely ludicrous that anyone in the public sector should receive a higher salary (including expenses etc.) than the occupant of that office.

  Of course, whether we include in those calculations the 65k MP salary that according to convention, if not the letter of the law, the PM will always be in receipt of, is a more complicated question. I’m tempted to say it should not be factored in because being an MP, as any of our current ministers would no doubt affirm, is doing an entirely different job from being a minister, let alone Prime Minister. You are expected to do both, and do them both well. As a result I think it probably best to take only those salary and expenses into account that relate directly to the office of Prime Minister. It might then, as politically unpopular as it may be, make sense to increase the Prime Minister’s and other ministerial salaries to reflect the supreme leadership role that they have. This is the case with the Presidency of the United States (if I’m not mistaken) – in order to increase other salaries, especially the high end ones, the President’s salary has to be increased because s/he is the chief executive of the US and as such his/her salary acts as a cap on all other public sector ones.